


counting off the things that i can’t say

by amorremanet



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Emotional Constipation, Emotional Hurt, Lack of Communication, Love Confessions, Love Letters, M/M, POV Derek Hale, POV First Person, Poetry, Season/Series 03 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-12
Updated: 2013-10-12
Packaged: 2017-12-29 06:10:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1001923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>So, here’s the situation: I’ve been gone for three weeks two days and fifteen hours. / I’ve tried to count the minutes too but my sister throws me off every time. / She says there’s no sense in keeping of track when these things don’t matter…</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	counting off the things that i can’t say

**Author's Note:**

> crossposted to tumblr [here](http://amorremanet.tumblr.com/post/63862366959/counting-off-the-things-that-i-cant-say).

My new therapist told me that I don’t vocalize my feelings  
not well enough not often enough and I guess it doesn’t count,  
that time I shoved you face-first into the wall, scented you  
and pinned you by your neck. You smelled like soap and cake  
frosting and generic off-brand floral body wash. And I’m sorry  
because I probably shouldn’t have done that nor shown up in your  
bedroom in the middle of the night but I swallow those words  
whenever they come up because you don’t want to hear them anyway.

Or maybe you do, I wouldn’t know, and maybe I should say them now  
maybe I should’ve said them months ago, maybe you need to hear them,  
even if it wouldn’t make things any better, maybe it just matters that I say them,  
maybe it’s the principle of the thing. I wouldn’t know; I’m not as good as you.  
(Not that anyone could be as good as you, but assuming someone could,  
assuming they’d get halfway close, I wouldn’t be that person and I know it.)

So, here’s the situation: I’ve been gone for three weeks two days and fifteen hours.  
I’ve tried to count the minutes too but my sister throws me off every time.  
She says there’s no sense in keeping of track when these things don’t matter  
anyway and I guess she’s probably right in some all things wither all things die way  
where our lives entangle and we fuck things up and the house burns down with  
everyone you love inside it, they all die charred and screaming and the universe  
doesn’t even notice. if God sees anything we do, He never seems to mind, and  
what’s the point in loving something impermanent someone else who could leave  
someone else who could scar you bruise you put their fingerprints all across your  
soul and then move on without a dent from you along their carapace.

I lost track of your scent as we moved southward. All the gasoline and motor oil  
and sweaty angry people on Highway 1 overwhelmed me and I couldn’t pick  
you out anymore. But still I wake up in the dank motel rooms and sniff at all the  
stench of mildew sex and artificial lemon cleaners and I look for you. Every  
morning, every single time, my chest aches when I never find you anywhere and  
when I walk by bakeries, I don’t know why they don’t stink like flowers too, or why  
the sea air along the coastline makes me feel so sick with lack when you’ve never  
to my knowledge smelled like salt, at least not in that kind of way.

You are the peanut butter that makes my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth.  
You are the novocaine that swells my lips and makes them refuse to move right.  
You are the knot I can’t untie and can’t slice open and can’t solve in the slightest.  
You are the wall that won’t come down for anybody, even when you think you might.  
You are all of these things and none of them because none of them, not even when  
they work in tandem, can really capture everything you are. But at least they make the  
point well enough for now. Or maybe they don’t, I wouldn’t know. I think I failed  
freshman English twice and you know that I’m no good with words.

Some scientists I read online said that everyone is made of stardust, that our  
bones can withstand pressures that would turn coal into diamonds, that even your  
uneven jawline is some kind of magic when you break things down and look at  
them, really look at them as through a microscope. It’s supposed to be even truer  
when you zoom the camera out: out of so many galaxies, so many planets, ours just  
happened to support life, all the different combinations and recombinations, all the  
choices by so many people that led to your parents finding each other, and out of  
some billions and billions of potential individual creations, only one emerged,  
against impossible odds without any chances in your favor. That’s you, a miracle.  
The only miracle I’ve ever seen, but I think you’d probably tell me that you’re really  
nothing special, that everyone exists against impossible odds, everyone’s a miracle.  
That’s why you’re better than I could ever be and I accept that even when you don’t.

So, here’s the story: a monster wants to be the hero, a monster doesn’t want to  
be alone, a monster’s always been a monster always stood outside and watched and  
waited, always waited, for some villager with his torch and pitchfork to rally up a  
gang of other people storm the burned out shell of an old house that no one ever  
came to anyway because they can’t let the monster stay alive. And then a monster  
meets a boy and he should be a monster too because he’s been bitten and they’re the  
same, they’re brothers now, they need each other, but this boy saves princesses and  
innocents and this boy stands between the monster and the wrong things he wants to  
do and this boy has no idea what he’s doing but he smiles so wide and it makes the  
monster sick because there’s never been anything so off-kilter beautiful in his life  
before and this boy believes that the monster’s so much more than a destructive force  
of nature in a black leather jacket, even though he has no reason to think this way.

And the boy believes, he doesn’t trust but he believes, and the monster makes a  
quiet exit backstage left because the fact is that he’s killed people for all the wrong  
reasons and he’s ruined people’s lives without even making his life any better and  
he doesn’t want to let the boy know any more about this because just maybe selfishly  
he likes it when the boy looks at him like there’s more to him than what he does.

Monster’s from the Anglo-Norman and the Middle French. I went to a library found  
their Oxford English Dictionary with the tiny font you need a magnifying glass to read  
and I looked this up so I could write this poem you’ll never read because my therapist  
told me that I don’t vocalize my feelings and you don’t pick up the phone and anyway  
I only get the nerve to call you when it’s three AM and I can’t sleep and everything’s too  
still and quiet to be allowed. So monster comes from Middle French derived from some  
classical Latin _monstrum_ meaning portent prodigy monstrous act or wicked person  
and maybe an atrocity. Disfigured and misshapen and not from nature, of great size and  
ferocious in appearance, part animal part human. So I’m the monster but you already  
knew that. You knew that when I threw back your inhaler. But maybe you’re a monster too  
in the prodigious sense, I mean, extraordinary. You make me want to be a better man.


End file.
